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What a seasonal hire interview should test

Everyone asks which software they've used. It's the one thing on the list you can teach in a week, and it hides the four things you can't.

  • Hiring
  • Practice
  • Season
A flat illustration on sage of an iceberg: a small tip above the waterline and a much larger mass in four bands below it.

Twenty to five, third one today, and the CV on the table lists six software packages across two lines. You ask which of them they've actually used. They say all of them, some more recently than others. You nod, write something down, and ask when they could start.

That was the interview. Both of you knew it. The decision gets made on whether they seemed pleasant and whether they'll turn up, which are not nothing, but you had twenty minutes and you spent them on the one part of the job that gets solved by somebody sitting next to them for an afternoon.

Then it's March. They're quick, they're tidy, and you find out in week three that they've finished eleven files without asking a single question.

The software question survives because everybody can answer it

What you're hiring in a seasonal preparer is a set of instincts about when to stop and ask. Whether they know that a figure looks wrong before they could tell you why. Whether they'll say "I don't know what this is" out loud in a room where everyone else is busy.

All of that is testable in about fifteen minutes, and none of it is on the CV.

Five identical rounded figures queued at a single narrow gate, all passing through it, with a wider gate beside it standing unused.
A question everyone passes is not a filter. It's a formality with a clipboard.

Bring a file into the room

Ten minutes. No stakes, no client waiting, and you already know the answer, which means you can spend the whole ten minutes watching how they work rather than checking whether they're right.

Tell them exactly what it is, too. This isn't a trap, and somebody who freezes at a real file in a quiet room with one person watching is not going to be better at it in March with six of them open.

Four things come out of that ten minutes, and you can't get any of them from a conversation:

  • Whether they start at page one and read down, or go straight to the loan account.
  • Whether the things they'd query number three or thirty. A junior who queries everything has the same practical effect as one who queries nothing.
  • Whether they'll say the words "I don't know what this is" while you're sitting there.
  • Whether they can tell you why the fourth thing didn't bother them. That one is the whole job.

The four questions worth the remaining time

Write me the email. Give them a live-sounding gap: you're missing a quarter of statements from a client with two accounts. Watch them write the actual message. Somebody who produces "Could you please send through your bank statements at your earliest convenience" is going to spend your season on round trips, and each round trip is a week. Somebody who names the account in the client's words, names the months, and says in one clause why it's needed has done the harder half of chasing before they've started.

One judgement, defended. Repairs or capital. Deductible or not. Pull something arguable out of a real file, ask which way they'd go, and then ask what would change their mind. Where they land matters less than whether they can hold a position in a domain where a great deal is arguable, and still be moved by a fact rather than by you frowning.

What did last season actually look like? Not "how do you handle pressure." Ask what the last fortnight before the deadline looked like, day by day. Rehearsed answers go abstract within a sentence: high volume, tight deadlines, great team. Someone who lived it names the file, the client who sent forty photos of receipts, the thing that broke at 4:45 on a Friday. Specificity is very hard to fake and takes no skill to detect.

A thick printed set of accounts lying open on a meeting-room table with a pen across the page, an empty chair on the far side.
Ten minutes with a file you've already signed off tells you more than the whole CV, and costs you nothing you weren't already spending.

Retire the ones with a known correct answer

If you want a proxy for care, ask what they got wrong last season and what happened afterwards. Everyone has a mistake, and most of them are dull. The signal is whether the story is specific, and whether they were the person who found it.

The reference call is worth more than the interview

Would you have them back? Listen to the pause rather than the answer, because almost nobody says no outright and almost everybody hesitates honestly.

And: by the end of the season, were you checking their work or spot-checking it? That single question tells you what you're buying: a pair of hands that needs a reviewer attached, or a pair that frees one up. The gap between those two is most of the value of the hire, and it is invisible from a CV.

Two paths from a small desk: one short path ending at a raised-hand marker, the other continuing straight past it into a stack of finished files with one file tinted differently.
Both people finish eleven files. Only one of them will tell you which figure they weren't sure about.

What changes when the preparation is already done

So the test doesn't go away. It becomes the whole role, which is an argument for doing it properly in the twenty minutes you have, rather than asking about software and finding out in March.

A weak seasonal hire costs you more than their salary. It costs a senior's March, which is the most expensive month you own.